Day Two – The Seven Pillars
Living an athletic life is the backbone of living a high-performance life. What does this mean?… Well, I want you to unleash your inner athlete, be functionally fit, be supremely capable, body confident and have a great-looking, well-proportioned body that looks natural and healthy and not look like you live in the gym. I want you to feel the mind-body connection top athletes, ballerinas, and fighters feel, and I want you to feel totally at one with yourself, connected in mind, body and spirit. I use the term athletic life to describe all of the above, and living the athletic life is not only the tagline to my brand, but it’s a reality that is possible for all of us.
The way I see it, there are seven pillars to athleticism. Programming ALL seven pillars into your life will unlock your innate athletic nature, get the best overall results and will make exercise more fun for you.
1. Strength
2. Endurance
3. Mobility
4. Power
5. Balance
6. Agility
7. Skill
As we have all differing genetics and sporting & training history, different goals, and take advice from different sources, the chances are some of your athletic pillars are currently very secure, while others are… let’s say… a little wobbly!
The personal training industry and general gym culture place far too much emphasis on strength, calorie burn and body composition, so agility, coordination and balance are often totally neglected, and skill development is vastly under-promoted.
Any given sport, activity, movement pattern or exercise can have multiple pillars as benefits, but this very much depends on how it’s done. The technique, tempo, range of movement and current ability level are all variables.
Let’s look at the deep bodyweight squat. It develops hip mobility and strength in your legs (primarily quads), glutes, core and lower back. If you do 200 of them right now, it will become a muscular endurance exercise… but do 10 of them slowly while holding a fully-grown labrador above your head, and it would be a strength exercise with an additional focus on your ankles, core and shoulders.
Ditch the Lab, hold a 60kg barbell behind your back, and double the speed of movement with a smaller range of movement; then, it becomes a classic quad power development exercise.
If you’ve never done a squat before, then just doing 3 sets of 10 with no weight and 100% perfect form is actually more of a coordination/skill and potentially a mobility exercise more than anything else. Or do a set of normal squats standing on a gym ball (please don’t); then suddenly the squats become a balance and inner-thigh endurance exercise primarily. (Due to the angle of your feet on the ball, you have to squeeze the legs together to stop falling off.)
Also, the order you have a set of squats in your program directly affects the main outcome. If you have done 20 minutes of heavy Good Mornings’ (an advanced exercise that targets the posterior chain muscles – lower back, hamstrings and glutes) and then you do a set of normal barbell squats at an average weight, the posterior muscles *(as they have been pre-fatigued) will be forced to work crazy hard, so in this case, squats will not really get a chance to work your quads at all! And it’ll be more like a Romanian Deadlift.
Exercise Programming
My rather long-winded point is that doing a set of any particular exercise can have a plethora of different nuanced outcomes depending on an eclectic range of variables.. and we didn’t even get into feet position! That’s why when developing your own exercise program takes some thought. How fitness coaches map out training plans for their clients is called ‘Exercise Programming’, and I’ll share my ten golden principles on that next week (Lesson 10).
The quality of your exercise programming is what separates world-class training from just working out. First things first, though, for the next seven days, we shall take a peek into each of these athletic pillars and look a little at the theory behind why they are so important… it’s only when we understand all the pillars we can start to make the best exercise choices.
See you tomorrow…